[simonw]

If you're building a UI that renders output from a streaming LLM you might get back something which looks like this:

  {"role": "assistant", "text": "Here's that Python code you aske

Incomplete parsing with incomplete strings is still useful in order to render that to your end user while it's still streaming in.

[trevor-e]

In this example the value is incomplete, not the key.

[cozzyd]

incomplete strings could be fun in certain cases

{"cleanup_cmd":"rm -rf /home/foo/.tmp" }

[stronglikedan]

If any part of that value actually made it, unchecked, to execution, then you have bigger problems than partial JSON keys/values.

[sublee]

Incremental JSON parsing is key for LLM apps, but safe progressive UIs also need to track incompleteness and per-chunk diffs. LangDiff [1] would help with that.

[1]: https://github.com/globalaiplatform/langdiff/tree/main/ts

[cozzyd]

Why not just chunk the json packets instead?

[xg15]

Only because you have access to the incomplete value doesn't mean you should treat it like the complete one...

[rictic]

Yeah, another fun one is string enums. Could tread "DeleteIfEmpty" as "Delete".

[Waterluvian]

I imagine if you reason about incomplete strings as a sort of “unparsed data” where you might store or transport or render it raw (like a string version of printing response.data instead of response.json()), but not act on it (compare, concat, etc), it’s a reasonably safe model?

I’m imagining it in my mental model as being typed “unknown”. Anything that prevents accidental use as if it were a whole string… I imagine a more complex type with an “isComplete” flag of sorts would be more powerful but a bit of a blunderbuss.